In the World

by Richard Stratton

  Because you can’t. Because it’s who you have become.

  I CALL MY friend Shane, another ex-con who lives nearby in Brookline, and who was released a year before I got out. This is a violation of the terms of my release; I know even without having heard it from my soon-to-be parole officer that I am not allowed to communicate with, associate with, or have anything to do with anyone I met and became friends with while I was in prison—just another of their ridiculous and virtually unenforceable rules. Forget that. Who else am I going to hang out with? Who else can I talk to who might understand what I’m going through, might even be going through it himself?

  I met Shane and we became close friends while we were both locked up on the ninth floor at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the infamous federal jail in downtown Manhattan, known among convicts as the Criminal Hilton. Shane is a former hashish smuggler, so we also have that in common, as well as our home state of Massachusetts. His family is originally from Iran. They fled after the revolution and settled in Boston. I met Shane’s sister, Diana, in the visiting room at the MCC. Diana and my mother began coming to New York together to visit us. After Shane shipped out, back to FCI Otisville in Upstate New York, where he completed his sentence, Diana and I stayed in touch. We spoke on the telephone several times a week. I wrote to her, and she came to visit. She is gorgeous, a Persian beauty, tall, with long, thick black hair and a proud bearing; smart, sophisticated; divorced, with a teenage son. I thought we were falling in love. I know I was. But then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. No more letters or phone calls, no more visits. It’s not easy to sustain these love affairs when one-half of the relationship is in prison. Shane had warned me that his sister was emotionally traumatized after having discovered her father, who committed suicide by hanging himself in the basement of their home. There was certainly a deep, profound sadness I hoped to be able to dispel.

  Shane picks me up at my parents’ home and we go for a two-hour workout at his gym in Alston, just outside Boston. It’s a whole new experience working out with all these state-of-the-art exercise machines after the crude equipment one finds on a typical prison weight pile. Coming off eight years of near daily regimented exercise—even while I was in the Hole and restricted to push-ups and sit-ups—working out has become so much of who I am, a part of my daily routine, a psychological as well as physical means of keeping my shit together, that I intend to remain that creature of habit, the person of self-discipline and mental focus that sustained me in prison.

  After the workout, we take a drive into Boston’s Back Bay to stop by and check the progress on a townhouse on Beacon Street Shane bought and is in the process of renovating. He tells me Diana is in Europe and advises me to forget about her. “She’s not a happy person, and probably never will be. You don’t need that in your life right now, Richard—or even any time in the future.”

  Shane takes us out to dinner—my mother, my nephew, and me. After the meal, outside the restaurant, I meet up with another jailhouse friend, Dr. David Buckley. The Doc, as I call him, is a defrocked psychiatrist who was implicated in his younger brother’s marijuana importing business. A sailboat full of Colombian pot was offloaded and landed successfully on the coast of Maine. The pot was distributed, everybody got paid, and they all went away happy. One of the partners got busted on another trip some years later, but not long enough to have exceeded the five-year statute of limitations. He made a deal and ratted out the Doc, his brother, and anyone else connected to the original smuggle. Doctor Buckley was running a successful if unorthodox business as a shrink in Fort Lauderdale, liberally prescribing quaaludes and other mood-altering drugs, when he was arrested and charged in the marijuana conspiracy. He went to trial in Portland, Maine, maintaining a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity defense. During his sentencing, he gave an impassioned allocution, ending with the classic line, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” and then he jumped out the window of the courtroom, landing, as he knew he would, on the roof of a lower wing of the building and sustaining no physical harm. He was quickly recaptured and sentenced to the maximum at that time, five years, and designated to a minimum-security prison camp.

  By the time I met Doctor Buckley in holdover at MCC in New York, he had so pissed off Bureau of Prisons staff at every institution to which he was designated that he was being shipped from a minimum-security camp to one of the higher-level prisons, possibly even the infamous gothic penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania—one of the oldest and toughest federal joints in the country and a major transit hub in the Bureau of Prisons system, a kind of intelligence communications center for all things happening at certain levels in international criminal circles. Doctor Buckley didn’t seem to mind; he’d heard that the guards and staff in the higher-level facilities were less apt to harass prisoners for infractions of minor rules and regulations since the convicts in those joints were doing serious time for serious crimes. My advice to him was that, true as it might be with regard to the level of one’s custody, he did not want to pick up a new case and end up spending much more than the five years he’d been sentenced to in the custody of the US attorney’s designated authority, the Bureau of Prisons.

  “This is no joke, Doc,” I told him during one of our talks at MCC. “You can’t fuck with these people. They are in total control. Just do the time. Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and get the fuck out, or you will end up being even crazier than you already are.”

  The Doc took my advice, sort of. We were to meet again a few years later when we were both doing time at a high-medium-security FCI in Petersburg, Virginia. We used to gather out on the exercise yard in the evening for what we called a meeting of the Riviera Club. We’d smoke pot and fantasize that we were not in prison at all but rather ensconced at some exclusive resort on the French Mediterranean coast, Cannes or Saint-Tropez, surrounded by bare-breasted, beautiful women. The idea was to tell each other stories, no matter how fantastic, weave tales of life in the world that would have nothing to do with the facts of our separate cases or the conditions of our incarceration. No bitching allowed. The hope was to escape the prison at least in our minds; and it worked . . . as long as the reefer was good.

  All of the members of the Riviera Club were doing time for drugs except one other guy from the Boston vicinity, who was a bank and armored car robber from Charleston, Massachusetts, the US capital of bank robbers. Stevie Burke is his name. A tough kid, and a sweet guy, but steeped in the harsh mentality of the convict. He’d been in and out of prison most of his adult life. Stevie and I became close, along with another Boston guy, Lance McMahon. In time, further violating the terms of my release, I will reconnect with all these guys and bear witness to how they readjust to the world, or reoffend and go back to prison.

  LATER, BACK AT my parents, I unpack, sort through, and then repack all the cartons—eleven total—filled with my prison writings—short stories, poems, the manuscript of my novel, hundreds of letters, a dozen journals, legal briefs and memoranda I wrote on my own case and for several other cases I worked on for prisoners who, if they could afford it, paid me in commissary—cartons of cigarettes (though I didn’t smoke tobacco, cigarettes are a negotiable currency in prison), ice cream, morsels of weed. I’m a packrat when it comes to paperwork, a hoarder of written records, any documents that might provide written evidence of having lived this life and help locate meaning in the experience through the words committed there. I shipped home reams of papers amounting to a trove of manuscripts over the years of my captivity in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. While still a prisoner, I would be charged twice with running a business from prison, though never convicted. This was yet another violation of the rules and regulations of the institution that I chose to ignore. They charged me with providing services as a jailhouse lawyer, which was true, though they could never prove that I accepted payment. And they tried to punish me for operating a business as a writer. I was ordered to pack up all my manuscripts and send them home. But they were never
able to show that I had been paid for my work.

  I will leave the cartons stored at my parents’ home until I can get a place of my own. Ah! Just the sound of those few words, “a place of my own,” fills me with anticipation. Some long-term prisoners come to call their cell their “house”; I never did. I never thought of the many cells I occupied as anything more than stops along the way to where I was going—to a place of my own.

  My mother and my sister drive me from Massachusetts back to Brooklyn Heights. We walk along the promenade overlooking the East River and downtown Manhattan, to arrive on Montague Street where we dine at a Japanese restaurant. To say that I am enjoying the variety of restaurant food after so many years of bland and sometimes barely edible institutional fare is to touch on a subject that often comes up when people learn that you spent a number of years in prison: food. “How was the food?” they might ask. In general, it was pretty bad, some things worse than others. I’ve always been a good eater. At twenty-one, I quit eating beef, pork, lamb—except during those times when I was in Lebanon and felt it would have offended my hosts. In prison, it’s not just that the food is bad or at best mediocre; it’s that the whole ritual of eating goes from the communal enjoyment of breaking bread with family, loved ones, and friends to rushing to line up in a crowded mess hall with a bunch of hungry, angry, tough convicts who brook no delays in getting their fare and wolfing it down in the allotted few minutes. Most of the violence that takes place in prison happens in the mess hall: stabbings, riots, beatdowns. At the penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I once witnessed a prisoner get shanked, near gutted, and left to bleed out on the red top, the area of red brick tiles just outside the mess hall doors. It was the favored spot for eviscerations, right in front of the guards. All this by way of saying that, immediately following my release from prison, to enjoy good food with family and friends is a blessed experience, one that will never pale, and a pleasure that can only be compared to that other basic, cherished human intercourse—sexual intercourse. I’ll get to that. I’ve only been out . . . what, two full days?

  BACK IN MAILER’S apartment, his top floor aerie and multitiered loft complete with rope ladders, parapets, narrow ledges that must be scaled to reach a crow’s nest writing perch high above the rest of the dwelling, we find Judith McNally and are soon joined by Maggie Mailer, Norman’s youngest daughter, and one of his sons, Steven, whom I’ve known since he was a boy when we lived in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It was during a winter season on a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown that I first met and became friends with Norman. The Mailers (Norman was then with his wife Carol, Maggie’s mother) lived in a big brick house on the bay side of the cape. My wife and I became friendly with Norman’s cook, a young woman named Bobbi, who lived in the apartment below ours across the street from the Mailers. One evening the phone rang; my wife answered and handed me the receiver. “It’s Norman Mailer,” she said. Norman told me that he’d heard a lot about me from Bobbi, and he wondered if I’d care to come over and watch Monday Night Football with him. We ended up drinking a fifth of brandy and half a bottle of scotch (my wife helped somewhat) and staggered home at dawn. Mailer and I became close friends, sharing our interests in writing, boxing, women, music, and marijuana. When Mailer and his friend, the former whiz kid and Kennedy speechwriter Richard N. Goodwin, bought a farm in rural Western Maine, my wife and I lived there for a time and eventually bought Mailer and Goodwin out. That transaction and my long close friendship with Mailer would lead the government agents and prosecutors who arrested and prosecuted me to believe that Mailer was an investor, money launderer, and knowing co-conspirator in my cannabis smuggling and distribution enterprise.

  My mother, GiGi, and I all spend the night at the Mailers. GiGi and my mother sleep in Norman and Norris’s room with the air conditioner. The past couple of days have been sweltering. I sleep in their youngest son’s, John Buffalo’s, room and am not troubled by the heat. That’s another of the few advantages to having spent time in prison; not only does it increase one’s enjoyment of good food, but after living through harsh conditions you might be subjected to in any number of jails and prisons in the vast American prison system, you can handle just about any discomfort you might encounter out here in the civilized world. As a wrestler in high school and college I used to say, “After wrestling, everything else is easy.” I can now say that about prison. Very little in the way of lack of creature comforts fazes me.

  Mother Mary—can a man, a loving son, say enough good things about his mother when she is so selflessly devoted to the welfare of her child? I used to say about my mother that you could go to her and complain, “Mrs. Stratton, your son just murdered a whole family down the block and chopped them to pieces,” and she would reply, “Well, they must have been very bad people.” I am her only son; there is just me along with my older sister. When I wrestled in high school, my mother was my most loyal fan. She very rarely missed a match or, when I played fullback on the Wellesley High School Red Raiders team, a football game. All during the years I was locked up, she and Mailer were regular visitors and correspondents. My mother came to adore Norman, and he her. This trip from Massachusetts was rough on her—she’s not in the greatest physical shape—but I know that to see her wayward son finally released from prison, and to be here to help him as he embarks on a whole new phase of his checkered life, has been nearly as uplifting and gratifying for her as it has been for me.

  First thing the next morning I walk several blocks from Mailer’s apartment to the United States Parole and Probation Office for the Eastern District of New York. I am there when the doors open at 8:00 a.m. My parole officer is a young African American woman with the unlikely name of Gloria Lawless. I begin by asking her how it is that I am on parole in the first place when my sentence under the continuing criminal enterprise statute is nonparoleable. Lawless gives me much the same explanation as my case manager back at the prison: good-time earned in prison is not actually deducted from one’s sentence. It is credited toward one’s release date but then must be accounted for under supervision after release. It still doesn’t make sense, but I am not here to argue. I’m here—as I was in prison—to do the time and get it over with. Ms. Lawless assures me that, if I abide by the rules and regulations of supervised release—which are exactly the same rules and regulations that apply to being on parole—there should be no problem. Then she hands me a bottle and tells me to pee.

  “Here?” I ask and reach for my fly.

  She’s not amused. “No. Take it to the men’s room. And it better be warm.”

  I piss in the bottle, return to her office, and hand it to her. “Steaming,” I say.

  “Am I going to have a problem with you, Mr. Stratton?” she asks.

  “No,” I tell her.

  “I hope not. But I can already see we have an issue that needs attention—this job of yours. You say you are employed in the law offices of Ivan S. Fisher. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “What will you be doing for Mr. Fisher?” she asks.

  “Writing, mostly. Doing legal research, then writing briefs, letters, whatever Mr. Fisher needs drafted—”

  She cuts me off. “Do you know that Mr. Fisher is on probation in this office?”

  This comes as a surprise. I am aware that Ivan has had some tax issues, to which he pled guilty, but I had no idea he was on probation in the Eastern District.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, he is,” she says and gives me a stern look. “I don’t believe I will be able to approve your employment.”

  I’m stymied. Once again, I’m reminded how dealing with these people—the government functionaries in the Bureau of Prisons, and now their counterparts in the Probation and Parole Department—calls to mind when I was a kid in grade school and was sent to the principal’s office after getting in trouble with the
teacher. Naughty boy, in trouble again. I feel like telling her: “Dear Ms. Lawless, at forty-five, as a career criminal from my late teens and having just served eight years in some of your most secure institutions, all the while never adhering to the rules and regulations, I hate to tell you this, but I am the one who is really lawless here, and there is no way I am going to look for another job.”

  Instead, I say, “Well, then we will have a problem. Because that’s the job I have. So, please, take it up with your supervisor. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  Jesus, Lord, does it ever end? Pee in a bottle. We may not approve your employment. These people are out of their federal fucking minds. I’m not supposed to be on parole in the first place! But, predictably, when I call Lawless later from Mailer’s apartment, she tells me that she spoke to her supervisor—who is actually the probation officer assigned to supervise Ivan—and, no, my employment will not be approved. “You will have to find other employment,” Lawless says.

  I hang up. We’ll see about that. I didn’t do my time in prison obeying the petty rules and regulations of the various institutions, and I’m not about to give in. No, if need be I will take the Parole Commission to court. I doubt there is a judge in either the Eastern or the Southern Districts of New York who does not know Ivan S. Fisher and who, knowing Mr. Fisher, does not regard him as a good, law-abiding professional who may have had some financial issues in the past but who nevertheless is not going to lead me further astray. Still, it’s upsetting. Here I thought I was through having to deal with this intrusive government supervision, and now it’s taken on a whole new dimension. At least in prison I knew where I stood.